August 19, 2017

Australia’s Catellaxy Files responds to a series of misleading pro-wind statements by pointing to the appropriate method of calculating electricity costs:

The first thing to understand – which The Conversation does not – is that electricity is not like pairs of shoes that can be sold at the same price tomorrow as today. The product consumers demand is not a quantity of megawatt hours but the continuous supply of electricity – its permanent availability to them in whatever quantity they require. This necessity for continuous supply places a premium on “despatchable” power from fossil-fuel, nuclear or hydro plants. This type of power is more valuable than power that cannot be controlled (wind, solar), and much more valuable than power that cannot even be predicted (especially wind). Moreover, power that is rapidly despatchable (hydro, some gas turbines) in response to sudden surges in demand or unexpected failures at other plants is more valuable still for its ability to plug gaps at short notice.

These differences in the value of different types of electricity already render The Conversation’s comparison of coal and wind power per megawatt hour useless. And rectifying its analysis is not, as pretended, just a matter of adding in “balancing costs” such as additional rapidly despatchable sources, extra storage capacity, or upgraded transmission equipment. For the insertion of a low-quality, unreliable source into the grid also reduces the efficiency and increases the cost of baseload power from coal or other sources which need to operate continuously to be efficient.

This leads to a second major unappreciated fact, which is that suppliers do not make economic decisions based on costs. Instead they make decisions based on the estimated difference between costs and revenue. If wind power can underbid baseload coal whenever the wind is blowing, existing coal stations won’t start up, and new ones won’t be built, because they cannot operate efficiently being turned on and off all the time, and therefore cannot generate enough revenue to justify operation or construction as the case may be. This in turn leads to a higher and higher percentage of unreliable power in the mix, with eventual blackouts.

The only way of assessing the true cost of wind and solar is to look at the overall electricity price before and after renewables are added to the mix. Once you do that you find overwhelming evidence from all over the world that markets with even modest shares of power from intermittent renewables have considerably higher prices than those without. That this is not a coincidence is confirmed by both the tightness of the correlation, and the equally impressive correlations over time within the same market – as the share of renewables increases, the price of electricity goes up, and it goes up very sharply with even 20-30% of nameplate capacity, or 5-10% of energy output, sourced from wind.

Although the discussion is about Australia’s wind power experiment, the details are also relevant to Ontario, as a recent study pointed out:

Electricity prices in Ontario have increased dramatically since 2008 based on a variety of comparative measures. Ontario’s electricity prices have risen by 71 percent from 2008 to 2016, far outpacing electricity price growth in other provinces, income, and inflation. During this period, the average growth in electricity prices across Canada was 34 percent.

Ontario’s electricity price change between 2015 and 2016 alone is also substantial: the province experienced a 15 percent increase in one year. This was two-and-a-half times greater than the national average of 6 percent during the same period.

From 2008 to 2015, electricity prices also increased two-and-a-half times faster than household disposable income in Ontario. In particular, the growth in electricity prices was almost four times greater than inflation and over four-and-a-half times the growth of Ontario’s economy (real GDP).

The large electricity price increases in Ontario have also translated to significant increases in monthly residential electricity bills. Between 2010 and 2016, monthly electricity bills (including tax) in major Canadian cities increased by an average of $37.68. During the same period, electricity bills in Toronto and Ottawa increased by $77.09 and $66.96, respectively. This means that residents in Toronto experienced electricity price increases of double the national average between 2010 and 2016.

In Toronto and Ottawa, the average monthly bills for residential consumers including taxes in 2016 were $201 and $183, respectively.

Much of the reason for Ontario’s much-higher-than-average electricity costs are the provincial government’s dodgy crony capitalist methods for increasing alternative energy sources in the power mix:

The problem of skyrocketing electricity prices and high bills is a made-in-Ontario problem directly tied to the provincial government’s policy choices. Ontario’s policies around renewable energy (wind, solar, and biomass) have resulted in large additional costs for consumers. More specifically, Ontario’s high electricity prices can be attributed to poorly structured long term contracts, the phase-out of coal energy, and a growing electricity supply and demand imbalance in the province that is resulting in Ontario exporting electricity at a loss.

July 23, 2017

Little moments like that kept adding up, incrementally nudging me away from leftism but not yet to full conversion. In 1988, watching a John Pilger documentary with lefty friends, another such moment occurred.

Pilger, as usual, was complaining about colonialism and racism and Aboriginal injustice, so naturally we — uniformly white, urban and privileged — were lapping it up. The documentary then shifted to the former nuclear testing site at Maralinga in South Australia, where seven British bombs were detonated in the 1950s and 1960s. Pointing to a sign warning of radiation danger, Pilger observed mournfully that it was written in several languages — “but not in the Aboriginal language”.

Startled by this claim, I looked around the room. Everyone was silent, including a few who had studied Aboriginal history in considerable depth, and so must have known that Pilger’s line was completely wrong. So I just said it: “There is no single Aboriginal language. And no Aboriginal language has a written form.”

I didn’t last long with that bunch of friends, either. Small note to self: my comrades will deny even their own knowledge if it runs counter to a preferred leftist version of events.

July 19, 2017

Peter O’Brien outlines the proposal to incorporate a permanent formal role for Australian aborigines in the federal government:

It started out as a limited initiative to ‘recognise’ indigenous Australians as the first occupiers of this land in the Constitution. At least that’s what Tony Abbott, an enthusiastic supporter even before he became Prime Minister, thought. And initially, it was thought that a majority of Australians could support such an initiative.

But since that time it has morphed into something much more sinister as revealed by the final report of the Referendum Council.

[…]

Since all government policy specifically relating to indigenes is intended to eliminate discrimination and disadvantage so that they may take their place, as equal in material and aspirational aspects, as they already are in citizenship, then, presumably, one of the aims of the advisory body should be to work towards its own demise. If it is embedded in the Constitution, that will never happen. It will linger on, a cancerous sinecure rather like the HRC, manufacturing reasons to justify its own existence.

Liebler gives the game away before the starting gun has even gone off:

“The option of inserting a new provision into the Constitution prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race was determined by delegates to be a “shield”, vulnerable to interpretation by the High Court, whereas a voice to parliament was viewed as a “sword”.”

Since when has a Constitution been envisaged as a mechanism to provide to some of its citizens a “sword” to use against others of its citizens. Yet Leibler disparages the idea of a ‘shield’ in the Constitution since it is vulnerable to interpretation by the High Court. By using the term ‘vulnerable’ he tacitly acknowledges that activist judges can distort the original good intent of legislation.

If that is true for the ‘shield’ of a Constitutional anti-discrimination provision, why would it not be equally true of the ‘sword’ of an advisory body. Here is one example of logic that might be employed thus:

“If the intent of the framers of this provision was that the Indigenous Council should have no powers other than advisory, why was it put into the Constitution rather than just left to legislation?”

If this sounds simplistic, it is, but it wouldn’t take a legal mind much more sophisticated than mine to turn it into the kind specious nonsense with which we are constantly bombarded by members of the Legal Left.

There is no doubt that the ultimate aim of the activists is sovereignty, because they have repeatedly told us so. This advisory body, this sword’, is the mechanism by which they hope to progress their aim. Some, on the Left, will argue that the activists only represent a hard core and that, if the indigenous population get their way on this, the majority will be happy, that will be an end to the matter and the remaining activists will become irrelevant. Yeah, sure! Pretty much the same way that jihadis have become irrelevant.

July 17, 2017

A selection of terms used at Australia’s Catallaxy Files to be considered for addition to their in-house style guide:

Allaholic Frenzy. (1) – “Display of highly agitated behaviour, often in a crowd setting. Can be triggered by almost anything that can be interpreted as disrespectful to Islam, esp. cartoon. Frequently seen in Islamic areas such as Pakistan, Afghanistan and England. Patients suffering from Allaholic Frenzy are advised to be cautious when operating machinery or motor vehicles. References. (1). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 6th Edition: DSM-6.”

Alutheran – “A forward-thinking progressive who thinks a man should be judged by the colour of his skin, not the content of their character, and who is thus supercilious and condescending towards an Alt-Racist.”

Billabonk – “Having a root next to a waterhole.”

Bolshie Ballet – “The carefully choreographed routine employed by all leftards when the hideous crimes and failures of socialism are brought up. Responses such as “but that wasn’t real communism”, “but Scandinavia” and “but outside forces” are very common.”

Faulti-culti – “(See above). A particular culture that, once introduced, will eventually corrupt and destroy a host culture.”

Fauxboriginal – “White people who claim aboriginality based on a fraction of their DNA or ‘how they feel.”

Fauxb/Fauxbia/Fauxbic – “The dishonest and slanderous labelling of an individual who publicly questions the narrative imposed by a self-selected moral elite regarding specific favoured groups which share characteristics such as race, gender, sexual preference, religious or cultural belief. e.g. Homofauxbia, Islamofauxbia. The labelled individual is portrayed as suffering from an irrational fear, akin to a dangerous mental illness, of one or more of the favoured groups, thus consciously separating themselves from the societal ‘norm’ and voluntarily surrendering any rights, protections or privileges. This pathologising of dissent is analogous to the historical concept of outlawry, wherein an individual was legally stripped of the rights enjoyed by fellow citizens as the result of an alleged crime committed by the accused. Said outlaw could be ‘hunted’ using means not otherwise permitted by the contemporary legal system. The Post-Rational branding of an individual as a ‘fauxb’ presently submits them for hunting (by any and all persons who express an interest) in a reputational and social sense only, though Self-Elected Retributive Justice Magistrates (SERJMs, or simply RJMs) aim to progress legislation to the point where the hunting of fellow humans is again sanctioned by society as a whole, or its unelected representatives.”

June 3, 2017

We know so much about Ned Kelly’s life through documents recorded at the time, and yet disputes over those details remind us how much different people’s perspectives shapes our understanding of events. James Portnow interviews series writer Soraya Een Hajji about Ned Kelly!

May 22, 2017

Ned Kelly sought revenge against the police. He built plate armor and planned to derail their train so he could kill them, but his plan was betrayed and police surrounded him and his hostages. It all came to one final showdown in Glenrowan, Australia.

May 9, 2017

Hunted by the police, the Kelly Gang decided to strike back instead of hiding. Since he blamed the rich for all his troubles, Ned took aim at the banks and pulled off a pair of brazen robberies that helped win him renown across the countryside.

May 5, 2017

HRH Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Canadian Regiment, presenting the 3rd Battalion with their Regimental Colours, 17 April 2013. (via Wikipedia)

Mark Steyn on the announcement yesterday that His Royal Highness will be retiring from public appearances this fall:

Buckingham Palace announced today that the Duke of Edinburgh will retire from Royal engagements this autumn. He’ll be 96 next month, which is a quarter-century past the average retirement age – or four decades past it, if you’re a French or Greek civil servant.

His Royal Highness is the Queen’s consort. That’s an ill-defined role prone to an accumulation of frustrations: for Americans, think First Lady or Vice President for life. A lot of consorts are unpopular with their spouse’s subjects (for example, Queen Rania, Jordan’s current Hashemite hottie). Prince Philip has been doing it longer than anyone in the history of the Royal Family, since the day in 1952 when he and Princess Elizabeth were at Treetops in Kenya and received the news that George VI (the King’s Speech guy) had died. Harry Truman was in the White House; Stalin was in the Kremlin; some guy called Mao had just taken over in China. That’s a long time.

I last saw him five years ago in Glasgow with my daughter, who was impressed by how cool he was, and how spry for a nonagenarian. Elsewhere, opinions differ. He’s worshiped as a god in outlying parts of Vanuatu, but in Canberra the ruling Liberal Party went bananas and ended Tony Abbott’s premiership for giving the guy an Australian knighthood. Still and all, he’s kept the show on the road in an age hostile to the monarchical principle, and one which has seen the crowns of almost all his cousins come tumbling throughout Europe.

Steyn also recounts discussing the respective Australian and Canadian constitutions with Prince Philip during the Australian referendum on becoming a republic:

As a Canadian, I was somewhat distracted by the referendum Down Under, which I kept trying to slip into the conversation. But the Duke was inscrutable on that front – or perhaps, as I now think of it, quietly confident about victory. Toward the end, as he walked us to the door before my carriage turned back into a pumpkin, I made an offhand remark contrasting the 1901 Aussie constitution with the 1867 Canadian one, and the subject evidently engaged him, because he launched into a very well informed disquisition on the differences between the two. There were a half-dozen or so of us at dinner that night – an earl, a viscount, a baron, a knight, etc, plus a plain old mister (me). I’d assumed upon acceptance of my invitation that we guests would be there as unpaid jesters to amuse our Royal hosts. But, in fact, HRH was a quickwitted chap, and we were hard put to keep up with him.

One of my fellow diners, bemoaning the lack of agricultural workers in Britain, explained that his farm now brought in young Australians and South Africans, who were able to make ninety-to-a-hundred quid a day (about £60,000 a year) picking onions.

April 18, 2017

Ned’s second venture as a bushranger brought him to the attention of the local police. He did time in prison, then tried to clean up his act, but became frustrated by the suspicion that continued to dog him.

This week 100 years ago, the Western Front comes to live with a big British offensive at Arras. The Canadian Corps and the British 51st Infantry Division take Vimy Ridge which had been contested for 3 years by now. The rest of the battles goes well in the beginning too but due to a snowstorm and the German defences it soon slows down.

The demographer’s Christmas is the day the ABS releases census results. It happens once every five years and that day, Tuesday 11 April, is fast approaching. Demographers are counting down the days until they can open their data presents. And now you can join in the fun with the demographer’s advent calendar.

Every day until the release we will be featuring a tasty data hors d’oeuvres to get you in the mood for a whole lot of Australian social demography.

April 8, 2017

When Ned Kelly lost his father at a young age, he became the man of the house but didn’t know how to support his family. Swept up by the grandiose tales of a visiting bushranger, young Ned decided to give crime a try.

April 5, 2017

Mark Steyn on the amazing discovery that a “female, atheist, black, immigrant” is really a white supremacist!

Over the weekend, I swung by Judge Jeanine’s show to talk about one of the most malign trends of our time: the ever more open refusal by one side to permit those on the other side to speak. As I always say, I don’t care what side you pick on the great questions of the age – climate change, gay marriage, Islam, transgendered bathrooms, whatever – but, if you’re on the side that says the other guy isn’t entitled to a side, you’re on the wrong side. […]

They don’t want to participate in the debate, and win it. It’s easier to shut it down and save themselves the trouble. Case in point:

Let’s just expand that “Somali-born activist” précis a little. She’s not a dead white male like me or Charles Murray. As someone once said, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is everything the identity-group fetishists profess to dig: female, atheist, black, immigrant. But, because she does not toe the party line on Islam, her blackness washes off her like a bad dye job on a telly anchorman – and so do her femaleness and godlessness and immigrant status. And in the end she is Charles Murray, or Geert Wilders – or even David Duke. A black Somali woman is, it turns out, a “white supremacist”.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is someone who fled genital mutilation and arranged marriage in a backward, barbarous society to come to the west and live in freedom. Her first stop was the Netherlands. But the director of the film she wrote, Theo van Gogh, was murdered in the street, and the man who shot him then drove two knives through what was left of his chest pinning to it a five-page death-threat promising to do the same to Ayaan. So she was forced to leave the Netherlands, and has lived with round-the-clock security ever since. Now she has to cross Australia off the list, too. Where’s next? Can she speak in Sweden? Or Canada? Ireland or Germany? She left Somalia to live as a western woman, only to watch the west turn itself into Somalia, incrementally but remorselessly, at least as far as free speech is concerned.

March 31, 2017

It’s not just the British that pronounce “z” as “zed”. The vast majority of the English speaking world does this. The primary exception, of course, is in the United States where “z” is pronounced “zee”.